Steven Manocherian

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

I’m interested in finding and funding the next Disney.

True to its original values, focused on the American spirit. Merit, family, overcoming of adversity, optimism, the pursuit of happiness.

AI makes everyone able to create. What will define our next generation is *what* we create with it. The next icons. The next unique brand that goes further than how it’s drawn or rendered.

Mickey Mouse survived several technological revolutions because of what it represented. I think most big entertainment companies have forgotten that.

If you’re creating something cool in this space and need help, technologically or financially, slide into my DMs.

[Marcus @mrcsxbt]

this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why every ambitious person isn't shown this lecture before work starts consuming their entire life.

clayton christensen dedicated his career to studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he turned that theory on his students: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life will you eventually build?

he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class.

at the fifth reunion, almost everyone looked successful. by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, some had stopped coming.

behind the empty seats were divorces, broken families, children living across the country, and people who had become wealthy but deeply unhappy.

none of them had planned that life.

work shows progress today. finish the presentation, ship the product, close the sale, get promoted, watch the number move.

an evening with your child may give you nothing you can show the next morning. it may take 20 years before you understand what all those evenings built.

so the next free hour goes back into work. the decision feels responsible, and tomorrow it feels responsible again.

this is how a life moves in the wrong direction without a single obviously wrong decision. every hour made sense on its own.

money, titles, and headcount fit neatly into a spreadsheet. christensen proposed another measure: how many lives became better because you were there?

he died in 2020.

open your calendar and look at where your time went over the last year. does it match what you say matters?

the full 70-minute lecture is in the video below.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Truly a saddening chart.

Weed is a loser drug. It makes you tired, lethargic, boring, and it smells terrible.

The decline of cigarettes is nice, but we could use a few more drinks and a little less ganja.

[TBPN @tbpn]

Enigma emerged from stealth today with a $71 million seed round to build robotic foundation models.

In practice, that might look like:

> Playing Pictionary with a robot painter
> Controlling one robot in a sword fight against another
> Asking a robot to do something and it responds in real time

Co-founder and CEO @jonathanj says Enigma's core research is focused on robotic foundation models, but they also care deeply about studying how people interact with robots.

Enigma is releasing a range of interactive robot experiences to test different ways people interact with robots. It will feed what it learns back into its research.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer

[Cristóbal Valenzuela @c_valenzuelab]

https://t.co/zhh4IOU1mv

[Khairallah AL-Awady @eng_khairallah1]

Anthropic engineer:

"You're not supposed to prompt Claude. You're supposed to build a system that prompts itself."

In 45 minutes she shows exactly how to build an agent that improves itself.

Most people are still doing all of this by hand.

Watch the session, then save the guide below.

[Alex 🧩 Scaling Video GenAI @alexmashrabov]

We scaled Higgsfield to a $400M run rate and 24M+ users in just 13 months after launch.

That makes us the fastest-growing video AI startups in the world.

But I’ve never shared how it started. Here’s the story:

[Steven Manocherian @steveXmano]

🤯

[Jalen Brunson @jalenbrunson1]

I just want to be successful thats all..

[Kenzo @Kenzooxbt]

MrBeast reveals why a 10% better video gets you four times the views, not 10% more

"I mentor YouTubers a lot. One of the people I've been mentoring recently, he was doing $24,000 a month and then he recently had a $400,000 a month on YouTube."

"He was doing 4 million views a month, 24 grand. And then probably like seven, eight months into it we got him up to 45 million views."

"It's much easier, as weird as it sounds, it's much easier to get five million views on one video than a hundred thousand views on 50 videos."

"You could upload one great video a year and get more views than if you uploaded 100 mediocre videos."

"If you get people to click your video 10% more and watch a video 10% longer than mine, you don't get 10% more views. You get like four times the views. A 10% better video is four times the views, not 10% more views."

[Tim Denning @Tim_Denning]

Obsess. For f*ck sakes. You only get one life. Don’t screw it up by being normal. Go all in. Act like a psycho. Let people call you insane. Please. I beg you. Obsession is the path.

[How To Prompt @HowToPrompt__]

A toothpaste company has quietly killed the entire market research industry and nobody is talking about it.

Colgate published a paper showing you can predict real purchase intent at 90% accuracy by simply asking LLMs to roleplay customers.

And this is beyond insane.

If you ask an AI, "Rate this product from 1 to 5," it gives safe, middle-of-the-road garbage.

So researchers invented a method called Semantic Similarity Rating (SSR).

Instead of asking the AI for a number, they asked it to roleplay.

They gave the LLM a demographic profile. They showed it a product concept. And they asked it to write down its raw, unfiltered thoughts.

Then, they used a semantic model to translate those written thoughts into a numerical score.

The results are staggering.

Tested against 57 real corporate surveys and 9,300 actual human responses, the synthetic AI consumers matched real human buying behavior with 90% reliability.

They perfectly mirrored how different age brackets and income levels react to price changes.

And they provided detailed, qualitative feedback that was deeper and more critical than what actual humans wrote.

This destroys the economics of traditional market research.

You don't need to wait a month to see if a product will sell.

You can simulate 1,000 hyper-targeted customer interviews overnight.

You can A/B test pricing across every demographic instantly.

[Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️ @EricJorgenson]

Everyone can use @elonmusk's "Magic Wand Number" and "Idiot Index"

They're universal ideas, helpful in any industry.

[Steven Manocherian @steveXmano]

both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism converge on laziness

[Imraan @imraan]

@pmarca interesting thought - who will revolutionise sport to follow the short format trend?

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Short dramas have quietly become a massive entertainment format.

Think next-gen soap operas: serialized, mobile-first, and monetized like games.

In China, they already generate more revenue than the domestic box office.

And now AI is going to blow this format wide open 👇